Advocacy in an Authoritarian State:
How Grassroots Environmental NGOs
Inﬂuence Local Governments in China
Jingyun Dai and Anthony J. Spires
A B S T R A C T
While many NGOs in China are seen mainly as service providers working to fulﬁll state
goals, in this article we show that Chinese grassroots environmental NGOs (ENGOs) regularly
employ a variety of advocacy strategies to inﬂuence local-level government policy.
Based on in-depth interviews with ENGOs active in Guangdong, this study examines these
groups’ advocacy efforts and considers their implications for the further development of
Chinese civil society. Our analysis ﬁnds that these groups employ three main advocacy strategies:
(1) cultivating a stable, interactive relationship with the government using existing institutional
means to communicate their concerns; (2) carefully selecting the “frames” used to
present their preferred policy goals and outcomes; and (3) obtaining media exposure to mobilize
societal support for their goals in order to put pressure on the local state. ENGOs use
these strategies concurrently, though their concrete choices vary case by case. Taken as a
whole, such practices suggest the ability of civil society to carve out more political space than
the state is commonly believed to grant. While this increased policy engagement by ENGOs
could lead to stronger state governance and thus help sustain China’s authoritarian system,
we argue that it may also open up new pathways for robust civic engagement by ordinary
citizens and civil society organizations.
The recent literature on civil society in China has generally focused on explaining
the survival of autonomous grassroots NGOs under authoritarianism.
While neither a liberal civil society model nor a purely corporatist model
provides a satisfactory answer, the extant scholarship suggests that the retreat
of the state from social welfare provision and the fragmentation of the state have
created a space for grassroots NGOs to emerge.1
Previous research, however, did
not fully anticipate a recent development that holds far-ranging implications for
Electronically Published online August 17, 2017
The China Journal, no. 79. 1324-9347/2018/7901-0003. Copyright 2017 by The Australian National University. All rights reserved.
1. Timothy Hildebrandt, Social Organizations and the Authoritarian State in China (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); Anthony J. Spires, “Contingent Symbiosis and Civil Society in an Authoritarian
State: Understanding the Survival of China’s Grassroots NGOs,” American Journal of Sociology 117
(2011): 1–45; Jessica C. Teets, Civil Society under Authoritarianism: The China Model (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2014).
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China’s changing state-society relations—grassroots NGO advocacy aimed at inﬂuencing
local-level government decision making. As we show in this article, in
the ﬁeld of environmental protection some grassroots NGOs are now regularly
serving as watchdogs to government policies, calling for implementation of existing
regulations, critiquing and campaigning against undesirable policies, and
exerting pressure on government to solve environmental problems. That grassroots
NGOs have taken on this new role as active agents seeking to inﬂuence local
governments is empirically signiﬁcant, especially given the recent intensiﬁcation
of controls on Chinese civil society.
In this article, we will investigate the ways in which grassroots environmental
NGOs (ENGOs) advocate for change in government policies and will argue that
such advocacy efforts may lead to an important expansion of civic engagement in
China.2
ENGOs have been pioneers in advocacy, as one of the most active and
developed sectors in Chinese civil society.3
More importantly, the ENGOs spotlighted
here take policy advocacy not merely as something they are occasionally
drawn into but as an integral and regular part of their work. A small number of
scholars have analyzed the factors facilitating and constraining ENGO advocacy,4
but to date there have been few grounded, qualitative studies of actual advocacy
activities, let alone systematic analyses of advocacy strategies.5
In the following pages, we ﬁrst brieﬂy review apposite literature on advocacy
to situate our study within current understandings of ENGOs in China. We then
depict the broader political environment ENGOs operate in—a mixture of tightened
control on civil society and favorable policies and laws about NGOs and environmental
protection. With the context set, we will analyze in-depth interviews
to identify the advocacy strategies employed by grassroots ENGOs. Our ﬁndings
demonstrate that they are able to assert a role as knowledgeable experts and proactively
inﬂuence government decision making. While many scholars have recognized
that improving the government’s performance and responsiveness helps
stabilize and legitimize authoritarian rule, we argue that such ENGO advocacy
2. Although we focus on ENGOs, it should be recognized that other NGOs, even those mostly focusing
on service delivery (e.g., in health and education), also sometimes engage in advocacy work.
3. Hildebrandt, Social Organizations, 17; Fengshi Wu, “Environmental Activism in Provincial China,”
Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 15, no. 1 (2013): 89–108; Shawn Shieh and Amanda BrownInz,
“Mapping China’s Public Interest NGOs,” in Chinese NGO Directory: A Civil Society in the Making
([Beijing]: China Development Brief, 2013), 1–23.
4. Li Hui, Carlos Wing-Hung Lo, and Shui-Yan Tang, “Nonproﬁt Policy Advocacy under Authoritarianism,”
Public Administration Review 77, no. 1 (2016): 103–17; Xueyong Zhan and Shui-yan Tang, “Political
Opportunities, Resource Constraints and Policy Advocacy of Environmental NGOs in China,” Public Administration
91 (2013): 381–99.
5. It is important to note that while the groups in our study may be concerned about global climate
change or nationwide environmental problems, most of their advocacy efforts are focused at the local level,
in their particular district, city, or province.
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ultimately implies another possibility—the opening of new pathways for robust
civic engagement.
ADVOCACY AND THE GROWTH OF CHINESE ENGOS
Current discussions of advocacy and civic engagement have been largely shaped
by the experiences of democracies, where policy advocacy typically refers to inﬂuencing
government policy making but can include “any attempt to inﬂuence the
decisions of an institutional elite on behalf of a collective interest.”6
Some scholars
make distinctions between insider/direct strategies—working directly with policy
makers and other institutional elites such as through lobbying—and outsider/indirect
strategies like shaping public opinion or mobilizing demonstrations and protests
to change the policy-making environment.7
While scholars have recognized that advocacy is not impossible under author-
itarianism,8
too little is known about what NGO advocacy looks like in China,
where interest group politics is not the norm and adversarial advocacy is not tolerated
by the government. Nevertheless, without explicitly referring to the word
“advocacy” or “civic engagement,” scholars have shown that Chinese politics is
not immune to inﬂuence from nonstate actors. Intellectuals and experts who have
served as consultants to government bodies or who informally are close to power
have provided policy suggestions through internal channels or interpersonal re-
lationships.9
At the same time, protests may be seen as one-off cases of advocacy
that push the government to attend to particular grievances and which may also
produce policy changes.10
Christoph Steinhardt and Fengshi Wu, for example, contend
that recent environmental protests have taken on a public interest dimension
by calling for policy reform and by inducing more explicit NGO advocacy.11
In general, however, many of the Chinese civil society groups outside the environmental
realm have been perceived as service providers as opposed to advocates,
and as “helpers” to whom the state looks when trying to meet social welfare
responsibilities and to conduct policy implementation. Though Chinese civil so-
6. Elizabeth J. Reid, “Understanding the Word ‘Advocacy’: Context and Use,” in Structuring the Inquiry
into Advocacy, ed. Elizabeth J. Reid (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2000), 1–7.
7. Reid, “Understanding the Word ‘Advocacy’”; Jennifer E. Mosley, “Institutionalization, Privatization,
and Political Opportunity: What Tactical Choices Reveal about the Policy Advocacy of Human Service
Nonproﬁts,” Nonproﬁt and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2011): 435–57.
8. Ian Scott, “Analyzing Advocacy Issues in Asia,” Administration & Society 44, no. 6 (2012): 4–12.
9. Shaoguang Wang, “Changing Models of China’s Policy Agenda Setting,” Modern China 34, no. 1
(2008): 56–87.
10. See, e.g., Yongshun Cai, Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fall (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
11. H. Christoph Steinhardt and Fengshi Wu, “In the Name of the Public: Environmental Protest and
the Changing Landscape of Popular Contention in China,” China Journal, no. 75 (2016): 61–82.
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ciety is growing and making changes on the margins, it is weak, not rebellious,
and lacks the capacity to promote larger social change.12
NGO efforts to alleviate
social problems can improve the state’s responsiveness and accountability, ironically
strengthening favorable views of the state’s performance and legitimacy. As
Jessica Teets puts it, NGOs may be contributing to “better governance under au-
thoritarianism.”13
In the environmental realm, the growth of environmental organizations
has been attributed to the state’s recognition of the many environmental
problems arising alongside economic development and to the weakness
of the state’s own environmental protection bureaucracy.14
Earlier research found
that grassroots ENGOs worked primarily on environmental education and nature
conservation, while they had not yet started to tackle underlying political and social
issues and were “less successful in inﬂuencing government decisions and ofﬁcial
behaviors.”15
Nevertheless, it was known that a few established ENGOs have been involved
in advocacy campaigns, exempliﬁed in a series of campaigns against building
dams in Southwest China.16
These campaigns marked the most successful and inﬂuential
cases in which grassroots ENGOs have inﬂuenced government decisions.
These campaigns also demonstrated that ENGOs are able to make use of the Environmental
Impact Assessment Law and the Administrative Licensing Law and
to mobilize social support to pressure the government to open up its decisionmaking
process and allow for a greater degree of policy deliberation.17
Some scholars
have argued that these cases also succeeded because of the initial opposition of
the State Environmental Protection Administration to dam-building projects, and
that in general the environmental protection bureaucracy was keen to solicit public
12. A recent study of China’s HIV-AIDS activists concludes, for example, that the obstacles to social
movements are virtually insurmountable. See Hans Jorgen Gasemyr, “Networks and Campaigns but not
Movements: Collective Action in the Disciplining Chinese State,” Journal of Civil Society 12, no. 4 (2016):
394–410.
13. Teets, Civil Society.
14. Peter Ho, “Greening without Conﬂict? Environmentalism, NGOs and Civil Society in China,” Development
and Change 32, no. 5 (2001): 893–921; Jonathan Shwartz, “Environmental NGOs in China: Roles
and Limits,” Paciﬁc Affairs 77, no. 1 (2004): 28–49.
15. Yiyi Lu, “Environmental Civil Society and Governance in China,” International Journal of Environmental
Studies 64, no. 1 (2007): 59–69; Tang and Zhan, “Civil Environmental NGOs.”
16. See, e.g., Lu, “Environmental Civil Society”; Thomas Johnson, “Environmentalism and NIMBYism in
China: Promoting a Rule-Based Approach to Public Participation,” Environmental Politics 19, no. 3 (2010):
430–48; Andrew C. Mertha, China’s Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2009); Heejin Han, Brendon Swedlow, and Danny Unger, “Policy Advocacy Coalitions as
Causes of Policy Change in China? Analyzing Evidence from Contemporary Environmental Politics,” Journal
of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 16, no. 4 (2014): 313–34; Guobin Yang and Craig
Calhoun, “Media, Civil Society, and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere in China,” China Information 21,
no. 2 (2007): 211–36.
17. Heejin Han, “Policy Deliberation as a Goal: The Case of Chinese ENGO Activism,” Journal of Chinese
Political Science 19, no. 2 (2014): 173–90; Han, Swedlow, and Unger, “Policy Advocacy Coalitions”;
Mertha, China’s Water Warriors.
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opinion and to bring ENGOs to the discussion table so as to bolster its own position
vis-à-vis other parts of the government.18
One recent study has found that ENGOs have engaged in policy advocacy
more often since 2005 and that those with more political connections to the
party-state system and richer ﬁnancial resources were more likely to do so.19
More broadly, the extant literature suggests that government-organized NGOs
(GONGOs) may be in a better position to advocate for policy change through
the corporatist structure in which they retain close ties with the state.20
In 2003
Jude Howell argued that the All-China Women’s Federation was “best positioned
of all women’s organizations to inﬂuence government and Party policy” through
acting as a policy consultant and using its contacts with government ofﬁcials,
representatives of the National People’s Congress, and the media. Howell argued
that independent organizations, by contrast, could only focus on service delivery
and not policy advocacy.21
A half decade later, Samantha Keech-Marx found that
three well-connected women’s organizations in Beijing were able to push for legal
reform by utilizing their state connections and borrowing the state’s language to
“frame” their recommendations.22
Similarly, environmental GONGOs have assisted
with government policy formation and engaged in advocacy coalitions.23
A recent nationwide survey of 267 ENGOs found that government funding
and subsequent collaboration with the government increased the likelihood of
ENGOs’ engagement in policy advocacy but suggested that grassroots ENGOs
were not well positioned for policy advocacy because of their lack of capacity
and concern about bringing trouble upon themselves.24
In short, the extant literature
indicates that advocacy in China by NGOs seems more likely to be found in
groups that are proximate to decision makers.
As noted above, the previous literature that touched upon grassroots ENGO
advocacy focused on campaigns against hydropower and other nationally or internationally
famous cases, and the organizations analyzed were typically wellconnected
GONGOs or a few prominent autonomous ENGOs such as Beijingbased
Friends of Nature. This is partly because in earlier periods there were only
a small number of ENGOs that engaged in policy advocacy. But this focus on a few
18. Johnson, “Environmentalism and NIMBYism,” 439; Lu, “Environmental Civil Society.”
19. Zhan and Tang, “Political Opportunities.”
20. Ho, “Greening without Conﬂict?”; Schwartz, “Environmental NGOs.”
21. Jude Howell, “Women’s Organizations and Civil Society in China: Making a Difference,” International
Feminist Journal of Politics 5, no. 2 (2003): 192–215.
22. Samantha Keech-Marx, “Airing Dirty Laundry in Public: Anti-domestic Violence Activism in Beijing,”
in Associations and the Chinese State: Contested Spaces, ed. Jonathan Unger (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe,
2008), 175–98.
23. Wu, “New Partners or Old Brothers?”; Maria Francesch-Huidobro and Qianqing Mai, “Climate Advocacy
Coalitions in Guangdong, China,” Administration & Society 44, no. 6 (2012): 43–64.
24. Li, Lo, and Tang, “Nonproﬁt Policy Advocacy.”
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famous, elite-led organizations has obscured the larger picture of advocacy by
grassroots ENGOs. This article aims to update the literature by examining how
grassroots ENGOs have made local-level advocacy a regular part of their work
and also to consider what lessons their advocacy holds for our understanding
of state-society relations in China.
METHOD AND DATA
Interviews were conducted in 2016 with leaders of eight grassroots ENGOs (four
of whom were interviewed twice) in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, two major cities
in Guangdong province (table 1). Guangdong is famous for its relatively open political
environment and has been a locus of grassroots NGO activity over the past
decade and a half.25
The interviews were supplemented by analysis of the ENGOs’
websites, blogs, written reports, and social media platforms, as well as news reports
about these ENGOs and government documents. We believe the eight groups generally
depict the situation of ENGOs in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The staff of
ENGOs in the same city know each other well; when asked to name other ENGOs
they knew, their responses generated almost the exact same list.
All eight groups are legally registered, having registered in some form between
2012 and 2015. Two of the groups registered as membership-based nonproﬁt
“social organizations” (shehui tuanti 社会团体), one as a for-proﬁt business and
the others as “nongovernmental non-commercial enterprises” (min ban fei qiye
danwei 民办非企业单位), a nonproﬁt category that allows an NGO to sell products
or services for revenue. Despite their relatively recent registration, all of these
groups were established in an earlier period, before registration processes were
somewhat liberalized. At the time of our interviews, the group that is registered
as a business had tried but been unable to register as a proper NGO. Nevertheless,
the group’s leader believed their operations were not unduly hampered due to this
legal status as a business.26
The eight NGOs are mostly medium-sized grassroots
groups, with six to nine full-time salaried staff, while the smallest has three fulltime
and two part-time staff. Their budgets range from hundreds of thousands to
several million yuan, coming mostly from domestic foundations, businesses, and,
to a lesser extent, government. They demonstrate a fair degree of specialization,
with three working exclusively on water, one on industrial pollution prevention,
one on waste, one on nature education, one on green transportation, and one on
wetland conservation, water, and community engagement.
25. Anthony J. Spires, Lin Tao, and Kin-man Chan, “Societal Support for China’s Grass-Roots NGOs:
Evidence from Yunnan, Guangdong and Beijing,” China Journal, no. 71 (2014): 65–90.
26. Registering as a business has been a common practice among grassroots NGOs in China (ibid.).
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Table1.AnOverviewoftheEightENGOs
NumberIssues
Registration
Status
Full-Time
Staff
Budget
(yuan)GovernmentalAfﬁliationInternationalTies
1WaterMinfei3300,000Leaderisaformer
BureauofEnviron-
mentalProtection
ofﬁcial
Leaderworkedina
US-basedNGO;hasties
toaHongKong-based
ENGO
2WaterShetuan3[Uncertain]YoungVolunteers
AssocationGuang-
zhou
HastiestoaHong
Kong-basedENGO
3WaterBusiness63,000,000NoneHastiestoaninternational
ENGOandaHong
Kong–basedENGO
4WasteMinfei6800,000NoneNone
5IndustrialpollutionMinfei8–9300,000NoneNone
6GreentransportationMinfei81,000,000NoneNone
7Wetlands,water,
community
Shetuan7–9500,000ShenzhenVolunteers
Association
None
8NatureeducationMinfei9–103,000,000NoneHastiestoaninternational
ENGO
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SHRINKING POLITICAL SPACE, FAVORABLE POLICY LINES
Though China has witnessed a surge in NGOs since the 1990s, observers believe
it is now a dark time for Chinese civil society. Censorship of the mass media and
of cyberspace has increased; human rights lawyers and activists have recently been
detained and interrogated; and several labor NGOs in Guangdong were suddenly
repressed in December 2015. The Overseas NGO Management Law, passed in
April 2016, places unprecedented restrictions on international NGOs (INGOs)
that operate in China and may cut off already dwindling INGO funding for domestic
NGOs.27
The state is also restricting NGO contacts with foreign organizations
and personnel. One group rejected our interview request, citing a regulation
that any interview with foreign personnel would have to be reported to the local
Bureau of Civil Affairs 15 days in advance.28
The space for NGOs has diminished
to such an extent that little room is left for even moderate and reformist NGOs
that were once able to conduct work in nonsensitive areas.29
NGOs that focus
on environmental protection have not been spared by the recently deteriorating
political climate. In October 2016, for instance, one ENGO leader was detained
for 10 days by a city-level Bureau of State Security for “leaking state secrets,” after
this ENGO had collected and widely publicized pollution data.30
Nevertheless, there are countercurrents in national policies and laws, many of
which originated well before the recent crackdown on civil society under Xi Jinping.
New ofﬁcial rhetoric promoting “social management innovation” has encouraged
local and provincial governments to cooperate with civil society and
has also led to the registration of more “social organizations” (including more
GONGOs). Starting in 2012, Guangdong was the ﬁrst province to reform registration
regulations, allowing NGOs to register with the Ministry of Civil Affairs
without ﬁrst needing to be sponsored by a government-afﬁliated supervisory agency.
As part of this reform, the earlier restriction against more than one organization
representing a particular constituency was relaxed. There could now be more than
one organization working on similar issues at the same administrative level, though
registering as a social organization (shehui tuanti) remained difﬁcult for some
groups. China’s ﬁrst national charity law, which came into effect in September
2016, could if fully implemented also expand space for civil society, for it relaxes
27. In our study, only one group received a small amount of money from a foreign foundation. After explaining
to government inspectors that they also had multiple domestic funders and were constituted as a
domestic NGO, they felt that the new law “wasn’t that big of a problem.”
28. In early 2016, the Guangzhou Bureau of Civil Affairs called NGOs to a meeting to emphasize that
any activities related to foreign funding and personnel should be reported in advance.
29. Samson Yuen, “Friend or Foe? The Diminishing Space of China’s Civil Society,” China Perspectives 3
(2015): 51–56.
30. “Pilu wuran shuju huanbao NGO fuzeren Liu Shu beibu” [Environmental NGO leader Liu Shu detained
for disclosing pollution data], October 11, 2016, http://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/arrest
-10112016073626.html, accessed March 27, 2017.
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the requirements to register “charitable organizations” (a new legal form of organization),
allows fundraising, and promises tax incentives to encourage philan-
thropy.
Our interviews indicate that the loosened registration in Guangdong encouraged
previously “illegal” grassroots NGOs to gain legal status and also new NGOs
to emerge. Taking advantage of the new regulation, seven of the eight groups registered
as NGOs in or after 2012. They said that registering was relatively easy.
One, originally based in Chongqing, registered as a new organization and set up
an ofﬁce in Guangzhou in 2015, explicitly because of the relatively open registration
and political environment. However, the openness of the new regulations
should not be overstated; as noted above, one group remained registered as a business,
probably because of its connections with a prominent international environmental
NGO.
In line with state rhetoric, the Guangzhou Bureau of Civil Affairs, which is in
charge of registrations, expressly supports the development of NGOs, which in
Chinese legal parlance are now called shehui zuzhi (social organizations). Guangzhou’s
New Measures on Social Organization Regulation, which took effect at the
start of 2015, stipulate that the government is to gradually transfer some government
functions (zhengfu zhineng zhuanyi) and outsource public services to NGOs.
It also stipulates that registration regulation agencies should establish bases for
“nurturing” NGOs. This increased rhetorical and regulatory support for “social organizations”
serves to increase their legitimacy in the eyes of the state and the public,
creating space for advocacy by ENGOs and NGOs working on other issues. To
make good on its promises, the Guangzhou Bureau of Civil Affairs has also organized
“venture philanthropy” (gongyi chuangtou) activities for three years since
2014, and by the end of 2016 it claimed to have provided 52 million yuan to ﬁnance
service programs proposed by NGOs.31
One ENGO in our study reported that the
funding it received from such government-organized venture philanthrophy accounted
for one third of the organization’s total budget in a recent year.
As for environmental policies, the greening of the Chinese state is also well
under way. The State Environmental Protection Administration was elevated to
ministry level in 2008—now the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP).
The new ministry has normally taken a favorable ofﬁcial stance toward ENGOs.
In Guangdong, the Center for Environmental Education and Communications
under the Bureau of Environmental Protection claims to be nurturing ENGOs
by giving small grants and awards, with the ultimate goal of achieving “collaborative
social governance” (shehui gongzhi) between the state and roughly 300 ENGOs
31. Guangzhou Bureau of Civil Affairs, “Gongyi chuangtou ‘Guangzhou Moshi’ yue zou yue shun” [Venture
philanthropy the Guangzhou model is working out well], November 15, 2016, http://www.gzmz.gov.cn
/gzsmzj/mtgz/201611/28062ef1066548eb9b344d23246a0be5.shtml, accessed March 2, 2017.
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in the province.32
The National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, amended the
Environmental Protection Law in 2014, strengthening the Ministry of Environmental
Protection’s enforcement power and emphasizing the government’s responsibility
to address environmental problems. Also relevant to ENGOs is the growing
encouragement of and legal requirements for public participation, as the amended
law adds a chapter on information disclosure and public participation. The amended
Environmental Protection Law also allows for public interest litigation, and NGOs
are qualiﬁed to be complainants. Overall, Chinese ENGOs work in a complex and
ever changing environment, with contradictory political currents but also a general
trend toward greater recognition of and participation by NGOs.
ADVOCACY STRATEGIES OF GRASSROOTS ENGOS
When asked about their work, interviewees from four of the groups spontaneously
stated that policy advocacy (zhengce changdao 政策倡导) is an integral part
of their work, while one group, though not mentioning this term, has had major
accomplishments in policy advocacy and deals with the government frequently.
Two groups do not consider advocacy as an integral part of their work, although
they do work to expand public participation. An interviewee from the ﬁnal group
speciﬁcally mentioned monitoring of the government (jiandu zhengfu 监督政府)
as their job. For these eight groups, the simplest and most common advocacy activity
is to request the government to address speciﬁc environmental problems—
for instance, to punish a polluting factory. Most of these ENGOs also offer policy
suggestions and initiatives to the city government and promote disclosure of information
by government and business. Two of the ENGOs’ leaders often write
newspaper columns critiquing government policies, and four of the groups have
initiated or participated in campaigns against government decisions and policies.
In seeking to inﬂuence the government, ENGOs as a whole typically resort to
three main strategies:
Strategy 1: Using Formal Institutional Means and
Building an Interactive Relationship
The government cannot deny the legitimacy of using institutional channels and
is generally obligated to follow ofﬁcial procedures when making responses. ENGOs
publish research reports and open letters, submit proposals to the city-level People’s
32. See “Guangdong niyong 5 nian shijian peiyu 300 ge huanbao shehui zuzhi” [Guangdong plans to
nurture 300 environmental social organizations within ﬁve years], Chinanews, December 13, 2014, http://
www.chinanews.com/df/2014/12-13/6874228.shtml, accessed March 3, 2017; and “Guangdong peiyu
huanbao shehui zuzhi jin 300 jia longtou xiangmu ke huo zizhu” (Guangdong Nurtures Almost 300 Social
Organizations, Dragonhead Projects Can Receive Funding,” Chinanews, December 14, 2016, http://
www.gd.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2016-12/14/c_1120112253.htm, accessed March 3, 2017.
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Congress or Political Consultative Conference, apply for information disclosure,
and make use of channels that the local government has established to show its
commitment to communicating with citizens, such as government “ofﬁce visiting”
days (jiefang ri 接访日), the Committee of Public Consultation and Supervision
(gongzhong zixun jiandu weiyuanhui 公共咨询监督委员会), and the “mayor’s mailbox”
in Guangzhou.
It was somewhat surprising to ﬁnd that most grassroots ENGOs were able to
directly communicate with the government through formal means despite few
prior personal connections (guanxi 关系). One group sent a letter to the mayor
through the “mayor’s mailbox” online and eventually had the problem resolved
by the mayor’s order. Another ENGO leader commented, “If you are not familiar
with certain departments, you can still send them something.” When asked how
he got in touch with the government the ﬁrst time, a leader who was experienced
in working with local governments nationwide said, “You just go and make an appointment.
You just need to ﬁnd them directly.” This was not easy, though; he
waited for months before meeting with the Guangzhou Bureau of Environmental
Protection for a ﬁrst-time, two-hour talk. Similarly, the ENGO that appealed to
the mayor had previously approached several city departments that had passed
the buck, and the ENGO was also ignored or turned down by city-level People’s
Congress deputies.
ENGOs sometimes favor formal channels even though they also have informal
talks with certain government ofﬁcials. One group led by a former city-level Bureau
of Environmental Protection ofﬁcial failed to talk formally with the bureau
but emphasized “following the ofﬁcial procedures” and “using ofﬁcial channels”
when advocating for information disclosure. The group had begun seeking formal
meetings with the bureau, arguing “it is to let the Bureau get accustomed to
dealing with ENGOs publicly, to improve their administrative efﬁciency . . . to
learn how to face skepticism from the public.”
Personal connections are still an advantage. One ENGO leader joined the
China Democratic League, which advises the Guangzhou government, “to know
more people related to the government, so as to make it easier to do policy advocacy.”
For the two ENGOs registered as “social organizations,” close ties with the
Young Volunteers Association, a GONGO under the Communist Youth League,
similarly make it easier to establish a cooperative relationship with local governments.
To quote a leader: “We use its name [Young Volunteers Association] as
an endorsement . . . because this relates to the problem of survival. . . . That is,
if we use this identity to communicate with the Water Authority, [they will think]
‘Oh, they’re from the Young Volunteers teams,’ so they will somewhat let down
their guard.”33
33. Interview with an ENGO leader, January 29, 2016.
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Although the new Environmental Protection Law entitles NGOs to ﬁle public
interest litigation (gongyi susong 公益诉讼), it requires organizations to be registered
at the city level for at least ﬁve years, which excludes grassroots groups that
did not immediately register after the relaxation of regulations in 2012. Many
ENGOs also cite their lack of ﬁnancial resources, knowledge, and experience in
public interest litigation as obstacles.34
Filing an administrative appeal (xingzheng fuyi 行政复议) is relatively common
when ENGOs apply for a local government to disclose information. A successful
appeal to a superior government agency would force the subordinate agency to
again review the ENGO’s requests. But none of the eight ENGOs regularly resorted
to administrative litigation (xingzheng susong 行政诉讼), meaning to sue a government
agency in court. A leader of one group said they view litigation as their last
resort, yet they have been carefully watching the government to identify any law
violations in preparation for an administrative lawsuit if need be. In a to-date rare
case, one group had ﬁled an administrative lawsuit against a district-level bureau
for its failure to publicize environmental data. The ENGO refused the bureau’s
request for a private settlement, and despite lacking conﬁdence in its chances of
winning, the leader emphasized the broader implications of the case—“to let the
law become the most important criterion of national governance” and to clarify
the Regulation on the Disclosure of Government Information.35
The ENGO eventually
won the case and later organized a workshop to share its experience about
seeking information disclosure and administrative litigation.36
Grassroots ENGOs also consciously try to cultivate a long-term, stable, and
interactive relationship with local governments. Rather than relying on preexisting
guanxi, they actively seek to nurture new relationships, pursuing frequent
communication with the government with the goal of building mutual trust. Underpinning
communication is the government’s realization that it needs ENGOs
to monitor pollution and to gather local information. For instance, one ENGO
actively sought conversations with the Water Authority, while for its part the
Water Authority wanted the group to set up a volunteer team to survey polluted
34. One group was nonetheless participating in litigation against a tourism development corporation
and a local Forestry Bureau at the time of our interviews, for it had identiﬁed an eligible NGO that could be
the plaintiff and was also supported by a GONGO.
35. Interviews with the ENGO leader; Yangyang Wang, “Yaoqiu xinxi gongkai, Guangzhou NGO
tingshang ju hejie” [Demanding information disclosure, a Guangzhou NGO refuses out-of-court settlement],
Caixin, June 2, 2016, http://china.caixin.com/2016-06-02/100950795.html
36. Chinese activists in a variety of ﬁelds have exploited the Open Government Information (OGI) reform
to advance their causes by seeking media exposure or administrative litigation when government fails
to comply with OGI requirments. Our study shows that ENGOs are also adopting this tactic. For a detailed
account of how OGI can be a tool for activism, see Greg Distelhorst, “The Power of Empty Promises: QuasiDemocratic
Institutions and Activism in China,” Comparative Political Studies 50 (2015): 1–35.
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rivers in Guangzhou. Another ENGO wanted the city government to purchase its
monitoring services but averred that “funding is deﬁnitely not the most important
reason” for participating in such a program.
One group leader who had pushed for reforms in Environmental Impact Assessment
regulations explained how gaining authorities’ trust enabled efﬁcient cooperation:
“With trust . . . then it’s simple and efﬁcient. For example, if I discover
a polluting enterprise, without good communication [the government] would need
to spend a lot of time to verify it. . . . But with trust, it would know that our organization’s
investigation is free of problems, that we must have sufﬁcient evidence.
All it has to do is penalize [the rule breaker]. So having trust saves costs and makes
both our work more efﬁcient. The government used to handle thirty cases per month,
but now it can handle sixty.”37
For ENGOs that critique government policies and behavior, request information
disclosure, and launch campaigns against government decisions, long-term
communication with government ofﬁcials avoids adversarial relations. When talking
about an activity by the ENGO that the government was not happy about, the
leader commented, “The government knows I’m not a radical person. I’ve always
been trying to communicate with them. Without communication, they don’t know
your real intentions. Without knowing your real intentions, there would be biased
interpretations.”38
This relationship with government is reciprocal, and the government sometimes
initiates communications with ENGOs. It is relatively common for relevant
city government departments to invite ENGOs to forums and meetings to ask for
suggestions and feedback. Based on exposure it had received in the media, a
group that registered in 2015 described how the Water Authority in Guangzhou
started to contact it: “From time to time, every one or two months, the Water Authority
invites us [to meetings], and the director of the bureau will come and sit
there and ask if we have any questions. We then make a series of complaints. He
will do what he can, assign this or that to somebody to deal with it. . . . They all
diligently take notes about what we say . . . but we do not know if they can really
deal with it satisfactorily.”39
Another ENGO reported, “People who are concerned
with politics or who are within the system, when they notice your organization . . .
they take the initiative to ask if you have any proposals this year.”40
Partly because
of these invitations, this group handed in 16 policy proposals before the 2016
meetings of the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative
Conference.
37. Interview with an ENGO leader, February 25, 2016.
38. Interview with an ENGO leader, January 28, 2016.
39. Interview with an ENGO leader, April 22, 2016.
40. Interview with ENGO staff, March 5, 2016.
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Strategy 2: Framing Issues—Not Blaming, but Assisting the Government
The ENGOs in this study are careful about the way they frame issues when communicating
with the local government. They have learned through experience
that aligning advocacy with central policies and local interests substantially increases
the chance of success. An ENGO that advocates for green transportation
wrote to the mayor and received a positive reply because, the NGO believes, the
mayor supported public transportation and bicycles to alleviate trafﬁc congestion.
The group acknowledged, “When asking him to bike with us, we took advantage
of his policy line.” Another group agreed that ENGOs should “keep a
close eye on central policy trends and the government’s work, combine your advocacy
with that and grab the opportunity.” All of the ENGOs recognized that
the national government has placed increasing emphasis on environmental protection
and that, as a result, environmental issues are now considered less sensitive
in comparison with other rights-related issues. This allows ENGOs to frame
their advocacy in line with central policies. Speciﬁcally, they frame their advocacy
as a form of public participation, which the state expressly encourages and is written
into the Environmental Protection Law.
Following the central policy line, however, is far from enough. Even when
ENGOs report a pollution case to the Bureau for Environmental Protection, ofﬁcials
could interpret this as criticism of the bureau and government by a troublemaker.
But ENGOs in Guangdong do more than report on pollution violations.
A vital strategy is to “let the government know that we have a common
goal and we are partners.” A group that met with the Water Authority, for example,
presented its case in a way that did not accuse the government of wrongdoing
but rather as a desire to assist in solving a particular environmental problem: “The
ﬁrst time we communicated with each other, both sides were nervous. . . . A deputy
head attended, with the bureau’s scientists and experts, they stood in the shape
of a fan, and only three of us were allowed to be there. We explained to them that
we are a social organization working on environmental protection in Guangzhou
who came here not to ﬁnd out who is responsible for what, but just in the hope of
offering assistance. We can cooperate with each other to let your work be smoother.
We just hope rivers and the environment will get cleaner.”
These framing tactics mean that ENGOs avoid potentially antagonistic relations
over sensitive issues. As one group put it, “Don’t say anything oppositional.
You should rather focus on good aspects” of government work. When the media
cover problems and negative cases, ENGOs are careful to promote positive exemplary
cases, in order not to “make the public and ofﬁcials pessimistic.” In a similar
vein, the two ENGO leaders who regularly contribute to newspaper columns,
though writing mostly critical pieces, do not forget to praise the government’s improvements
or any positive policies and regulations. Other groups practice the
same tactics in their websites and social media platforms.
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Strategy 3: Mobilizing Social Support
In contrast to Steinhardt and Wu’s analysis in a recent issue of The China Journal
about environmental protest repetoires, none of these eight groups engaged in “street
mobilization” of local citizens, not even indirectly. While some of the groups’
staff and volunteers had been involved in Guangzhou’s Panyu District incinerator
protests of 2009,41
the ENGOs they now belong to choose to mobilize social support
via the mass media and the internet to bolster their inﬂuence, to expose
problems, and to exert pressure on the government when necessary.42
Their newspaper
commentaries on the environment are a “dialogue with government at a distance,”
according to one ENGO’s leader, for “the government reads these commentaries
and collects public opinions” and sometimes publishes responses in
newspapers.43
In addition, social media is increasingly important in shaping public
opinion in China. The self-proclaimed advocacy ENGO is adept at launching campaigns
and creating polls on social media to mobilize public support and attract
authorities’ attention.
In some cases, when ENGOs fail to inﬂuence the government through institutional
means or direct communications—for instance, when the government simply
ignores the problems, their critical voices, and their policy suggestions—they
resort to the media to “force the government to do something. If the government
ignores us, we use more radical means to force it to attend to us.”44
For instance,
an ENGO once phoned a government ofﬁcial to report that the red mud produced
by subway construction was directly poured into a river, but an investigator
from the Bureau of Environmental Protection commented, “do not call us over
such a triﬂe.” So the group “made it a big deal, We put this information online,
and the mass media followed up. Because of this incident, the government adjusted
its policy to ‘guard the river’ and reinforced its implementation. . . . Later, the construction
company was penalized.”45
The “nature education” ENGO usually does not interact with the government but
once used the media to force a tourist development corporation that was backed
by the local government to stop building roads in the core areas of a regional nature
reserve. Initially, the group wrote an open letter to the Forestry Bureau, but
this did not have much effect: “In fact, we shouldered pressures and didn’t receive
a positive response. Our volunteers would receive phone calls saying, ‘Do not do
41. Steinhardt and Wu, “In the Name of the Public,” 71–73.
42. Steinhardt and Wu, like us, see the mass media as a key mobilization strategy, but in our cases none
of that mobilization had a spillover into street protests. This is perhaps due to the tightened atmosphere for
civil society actors, but it may also be due to the professionalization and institutionalization of ENGOs in
general or other individual factors.
43. Interview with an ENGO leader, January 29, 2016.
44. Interview with an ENGO leader, April 22, 2016.
45. Interview with an ENGO leader, May 26, 2016.
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this anymore.’” In contrast, the pressure the non-local mass media exerted on the
government was effective: “Local media was under pressure to prohibit coverage
on this, so we found some news media from Beijing, and held a conference to explain
the situation. After that, the media in Beijing covered the incident. After the
coverage, very quickly the local government made a response. . . . The corporation
promised to stop construction immediately and to start to restore vegetation.”
Another ENGO found that a sewage treatment plant, located only one kilometer
upstream from a water supply facility, was failing to meet quality standards
each year about 20 percent of the time. The plant’s environmental impact assessment
(EIA) report was also deeply ﬂawed, and the company that conducted the
EIA had already lost its ofﬁcial qualiﬁcation to do so because of its poor performance.
Several ENGOs informed local Political Consultative Conference representatives
and journalists about this, but their entreaties initially failed to generate
any action or publicity. Several months later, however, a journalist ﬁnally reported
on it and very soon other media pursued it, putting public pressure on the government.
One ENGO leader heard from a government contact that after this incident
had come to the attention of the Guangzhou mayor and the city’s Party
secretary, the government organized a team to prepare a lengthy report and took
action to resolve the problems.
LIMITATIONS OF ENGO ADVOCACY
The three aforementioned advocacy strategies, however useful, cannot assure success.
The Chinese government’s decision-making process is seldom transparent.
Especially when ENGOs advocate forchange through institutional channels, a substantial
portion of their suggestions are simply ignored. Delayed responses and
passing the buck are common practices. Though ENGOs believe that their voices
have made a difference and that some policy suggestions resulted in new government
practices or were written into new regulations, they often could not tell how
and why certain suggestions were accepted or rejected. Opposing government policies
or decisions presents a formidable challenge, especially when the opposition
is based on pure environmental reasons. Rather, ENGO advocacy is most likely to
succeed when it coincides with the government’s stated goals or when it is supported
by particular factions within the government. To that end, one ENGO learned to
ask the Bureau of Environmental Protection if it has any needs or problems the
group can help address: “Within the government, they have their problems, too. . . .
They are implementers of policy. . . . Revising policy isn’t part of their bailiwick. . . .
But there are some policies they realize need changing, things that maybe were OK
ﬁve years ago but don’t work any more now. . . . But the government cannot readily
change policies from the inside.” These are opportunities ENGOs can seize on.
Yet pursuing a stable, interactive relationship with the government can also risk
diminishing the advocacy function of ENGOs; some groups might end up “work-
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ing for” the government or a particular government department. One ENGO in
the sample has become content with reporting pollution cases, asking businesses
to disclose information, and providing some suggestions through the NPC and
CPPCC. Its leaders proudly spoke of how they could bypass convoluted ofﬁcial
procedures for complaints and directly speak to certain ofﬁces within the bureau
about their investigations. While this approach may help achieve the group’s immediate
goals, it has ceased making efforts to elicit any wider civic participation
that engages ordinary citizens.
MOBILIZING PUBLIC PARTICIPATION
A majority of the eight ENGOs adopted the strategies outlined above; however,
there do exist contending ideas about state-society relations and advocacy among
our group of interviewees. In general, the ENGOs that actively seek an interactive
relationship with the government tend to emphasize that pressing the government
to take action and to be more competent is the most efﬁcient way to realize
environmental protection. As one leader remarked, “after all, water protection is
the government’s [job]. . . . Civic forces cannot do that.”
In contrast, another group, though also seeking ties with the government, prefers
more direct on-site activities, such as conducting projects to teach villagers
how to help themselves by introducing convenient water-testing tools and cheap
handmade water puriﬁers. It once worked with local villagers to build water cellars
and water pipelines, meeting the daily need of 30 households. When that
project proposal was initially presented, villagers immediately commented, “You
should talk to the government. We peasants know nothing and we cannot solve
the problem by ourselves.” In response, the ENGO led villagers to ﬁnish the project,
and wrote on its website: “We are complaining about environmental problems,
but who do we count on to solve the problems? . . . People take for granted
that the government causes and solves environmental problems. This gives the
government more reasons to collect more taxes and recruit more ofﬁcials. Is that
a reasonable solution?”
The leader of another ENGO had previously worked at an international advocacy
ENGO but came to believe that “pure” advocacy was not the best approach,
which motivated him to join a grassroots ENGO full-time:
We had to spend a lot of our time ﬁghting [kangzheng 抗争] to inﬂuence government
policies, but many ordinary people did not understand. They only thought about
economic development, so you felt your work couldn’t get much support. . . . I want
to work on public participation, to look for a way that enables more and more people
to form a force for change. . . . We want to take the ﬁrst step, to let families know
about the environment. After that, they will be thinking, “What can I do?” Then
they would start from their families, such as reducing waste and consumption, etc.
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After this, they would start to pay attention to [larger] environmental issues. . . . If
they see something they are not comfortable with, such as reclamation . . . they
would stand out to oppose it. . . . If you want ordinary citizens to go to the streets,
they must have some prior knowledge.46
ENGOs encourage citizens’ participation by persuading them to patrol and
test rivers, by showing them environmentally harmful products in supermarkets,
and by forming online discussion groups. Through online and ofﬂine activities,
ENGOs teach the public how to apply for government information disclosure,
how to report problems to the local Bureau of Environmental Protection, and how
to write opinion letters to the bureau, even offering a letter template to build on.
To be clear, the two approaches—working with the government and promoting
public participation—are not contradictory; instead, most groups claim to be
working in both directions. However, the ENGOs reported that mobilizing public
participation is much more difﬁcult than expected. One ENGO emerged out
of a community-based NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) protest against constructing
a waste incinerator, and so casual observers might expect this group to have
extensive contacts with local communities. But we found that it was distant from
the local community, having close ties only with environmental activists and scholars.
Another group that has been relatively successful in mobilizing public support
complained that gaining it “is really a big obstacle. You want to renew their
ideas, but it is a very difﬁcult job, more difﬁcult than sending policy proposals to
the government.”
MULTIPLE ADVOCACY STRATEGIES: PROTECTING
GUANGZHOU’S LIUXI RIVER
A campaign to preserve the “protected zone” designation of the lower course of
the Liuxi River (流溪河), which runs through Guangzhou, is illustrative of how
ENGOs deployed multiple advocacy strategies simultaneously to inﬂuence the
decisions of the city and provincial governments. In January 2015, the Guangzhou
Water Bureau proposed removing the protected zone designation, arguing
that the water quality had fallen short of the standard for drinking water for a
long time and that Guangzhou no longer relied on the river for drinking water.
This proposal was supposed to be agreed upon by the Guangzhou Bureau of Environmental
Protection and eventually ﬁnalized by the Guangdong provincial
government.
The Water Bureau allowed only seven days for public comments on the proposal,
but ﬁve water pollution ENGOs joined forces to voice their opposition and
46. As we have already noted, however, getting ordinary citizens to “go to the streets” is not a practice
these ENGOs engaged in.
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managed to submit opinions collected from ﬁve hundred residents along with
letters by the ENGOs. They also succeeded in getting a series of news stories
and opinion articles published in newspapers and social media. In published comments
to the Water Bureau, they openly questioned the government’s true motive
for seeking to remove the protected zone designation: “Several key industrial
projects are to be located in the river’s water source protection zone. Is this proposal
to make way for those projects?” The Water Bureau later invited several
ENGOs to join a roundtable to talk about the bureau’s proposal, but it was a tense
meeting where both parties insisted on their own positions, and at the end of the
meeting the bureau’s plan remained unchanged. To press their view, the three water
ENGOs identiﬁed sympathetic allies in the city-level Political Consultative
Conference and sought attention for the issue at the annual meeting of the local
People’s Congress.
Facing constant opposition, the Water Bureau and the Bureau of Environmental
Protection responded through newspapers, repeatedly promising to improve
the Liuxi River’s water quality even after removing the protected zone. ENGOs
doubted their sincerity, and published opinion pieces. In March 2016, the Guangzhou
city government announced a plan for water treatment speciﬁcally for this
local river. However, ENGOs still demanded that the protected zone “not be reduced
even one inch.”
During the second phase of the protection zone adjustment, the city Bureau of
Environmental Protection followed ofﬁcial administrative procedures to organize
a public hearing. In June 2016, one month before the hearing, the bureau revealed
that the protection zone would remain but be signiﬁcantly reduced in size. When
preparing for the hearing, ENGOs collected and sent thousands of people’s messages
to the mayor and continued to publish opinion articles, arguing for keeping
the original protection zone.
In October, the provincial government made the ﬁnal decision to reduce the
ofﬁcial protection zone but promised that the original area would be maintained
as a “quasi-protection” zone and thus still prohibit polluting industrial projects.
In this case of protracted and collective advocacy, ENGOs were unsuccessful in
their ﬁght to preserve the original protection zone in its entirety, but the city government
also made concessions. As one ENGO leader commented: “The next time
they plan to develop the economy in a fashion that’s unfriendly to the environment,
they’ll know these ENGOs are going to oppose them and form obstacles.”
ASSERTIVE ADVOCATES AND GROWING CIVIC
ENGAGEMENT IN AN AUTHORITARIAN STATE
The ﬁndings presented here partially support a “consultative authoritarianism”
model. Local governments have adopted the idea of “social management innovation”
and “collaborative governance” (xietong zhili 协同治理) to encourage NGOs
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to alleviate social problems. The ENGOs in our study have cooperated with the
state in ways that increase transparency and bring residents’ voices into policy
making, improving government performance and perhaps helping the state’s efforts
to maintain social stability.47
However, it should be highlighted that, as in the
case of protecting the Liuxi River we have just described, most of these ENGOs
are not limited to playing the roles of service providers or policy participants assigned
to them by the government. They also engage in critical activities to change
government actions.48
It can be argued that the state permits critical voices in order to let ENGOs
serve as outlets for discontent that can be contained within the state’s control. In
this line of thinking, inviting civil society into the policy-making process can be
a way to co-opt these groups. This may contain some truth, but it overemphasizes
the omnipotence of the local state while overlooking subtle dynamics in civil society’s
relations with the state. Our ﬁndings suggest that the consultative authoritarianism
model is more of an ideal the authoritarian state wishes to realize than a
reﬂection of the actual dynamics between ENGOs and the government. Once the
state opens up channels of communication with ENGOs, ENGOs use these channels
in ways not fully under the control of the state. This demonstrates the importance
of the agency of civil society, as opposed to a state-centered view. In our
study, four groups out of eight managed to continue their advocacy while under
government pressure to stop doing so. Though most ENGOs emphasized their
major goal is environmental protection, some also argued that ENGOs should
“balance” the government and “provide a societal perspective to policies” and that
“policies have to be deliberated.” One group was bolder, asserting that its proper
role is to “monitor the government, otherwise government power is boundless.”
These ideas support the argument that ENGOs are promoting policy deliberation
with the government as an end in itself.49
Nevertheless, ENGO advocacy at present is cautious, piecemeal, and limited to
environmental governance issues. Groups are careful to avoid fundamental political
issues, and the state remains both the agenda setter and ﬁnal decision maker.
Moreover, few groups exclusively work on policy advocacy, and most are engaging
sometimes in mutually beneﬁcial cooperation with the government. One group’s
leader noted his strategy about publishing commentaries in newspapers: “I think
a line does exist. Some articles cannot get published, but I keep writing so that I
know where the bottom line is. The next time I try to touch that bottom line . . .
47. Teets, Civil Society.
48. Our analysis should also be differentiated from Lee and Zhang’s model of “bargained authoritarianism”
in the labor rights ﬁeld. Unlike labor protests, ENGOs’ advocacy aims for inclusion in the decisionmaking
process. See Ching Kwan Lee and Yonghong Zhang, “The Power of Instability: Unraveling the
Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China,” American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 6
(2013): 1475–1508.
49. Han, “Policy Deliberation.”
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if it gets published, I think I can go on writing, pushing that line a little further.”
ENGOs are keenly aware of the limits and frustrations of their strategies, yet a
sense of gradual success and a focus on concrete environmental governance reinforce
their belief in their current advocacy strategies.
Our ﬁndings also support previous arguments that the Chinese state is becoming
more open to inﬂuence from civil society, at least in the environmental ﬁeld
and in relatively open locations such as Guangdong.50
But in many previous studies,
GONGOs, rather than NGOs, were the groups able to engage in policy advocacy.
In contrast, our ﬁndings show that proactive advocacy efforts are also being
pursued by medium-sized NGOs outside the elite stratum; groups with no
formal links to the state and little guanxi are able to establish working relationships
with the local government and inﬂuence policy.
Aside from the ENGOs’ own efforts, political opportunities resulting from favorable
policy lines or laws and support from within environmental protection
bureaucracies are important factors that have made ENGO advocacy possible.
ENGOs meet fewer obstacles when their work supports the goals of certain government
agencies such as environmental protection bureaucracies. Ofﬁcials looking
for practical solutions to environmental problems tend to give support to ENGOs
to conduct investigations, monitor the behavior of industry, and reinforce policy
implementation. Just as important, when environmental protection bureaucracies
seek to clamp down on local polluters, they can ﬁnd support from ENGOs as “representatives
of the people.” This is especially helpful when the polluters are supported
by local prodevelopment government agencies more powerful than the environmental
protection bureaucracies. Similarly, in the antidam campaigns, the
Ministry of Environmental Protection formed a coalition with ENGOs to “borrow”
support when it had concerns about dam construction.51
In analyzing our data, we are struck by how many of the activities Chinese
ENGOs engage in are similar to what environmental advocacy groups do in democracies,
including contacting a local councillor, contacting a member of parliament,
signing a petition, writing to an editor of a newspaper, attending a public
meeting/consultation, focusing on pressing local issues, and participating in webbased
discussions.52
Some ENGOs with close ties to their volunteers and local
residents consciously mobilize residents to participate in environmental protection
by recycling, testing river water near homes, and joining efforts to peacefully
challenge government policy. As seen in the efforts to preserve the protected zone
status of a local river, ENGOs not only contribute to a greater awareness of envi-
50. See, e.g., Mertha, China’s Water Warriors.
51. Han, Swedlow, and Unger, “Policy Advocacy Coalitions”; Lu, “Environmental Civil Society.”
52. Damon Timothy Alexander, Jo Barraket, Jenny M. Lewis, and Mark Considine, “Civic Engagement
and Associationalism: The Impact of Group Membership Scope versus Intensity of Participation,” European
Sociological Review 28, no. 1 (2012): 43–58.
Advocacy in an Authoritarian State • 000
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ronmental problems but also broaden the civic engagement repertoire of average
citizens. Especially when the mass media gets involved, the local government sometimes
responds in a way that shores up an ENGO’s legitimacy and the evaluation
of its performance in the eyes of the public (and, surely, in the eyes of local ofﬁcials’
superiors).
While the ENGOs in our study are predominantly not the ideal-typical voluntary
associations of democratic societies—as they have few members, among other
differences—in China, a country without a democratic history, the leaders and
staff of these ENGOs are teaching themselves how to engage as citizens in a democracy
might. To the extent that they incorporate volunteers and mobilize public
opinion, they are also nurturing civic engagement. If in the future these groups
attract a larger membership in support of their advocacy activities, we may anticipate
that civic engagement will radiate beyond these organizations. As noted earlier,
scholars tend to agree that Chinese civil society groups that cooperate with
the state can improve the state’s performance, which in turn can reinforce the regime’s
stability, especially since ENGOs only advocate to change speciﬁc environmental
policies and practices while not touching upon political reform. However,
the kinds of ENGO advocacy described above also constitute an increased civic
engagement, one involving both organizations (the ENGOs themselves) and the
public that support them.
To conclude, in our examination of ENGO advocacy in Guangdong we ﬁnd
that ENGOs are working to carve out space to engage with both the state and
the public in new ways. Despite many challenges, these ENGOs have taken on
policy advocacy as part of their core work, and are taking actions to inﬂuence
government decisions and policies. Usually this is framed as supportive of government
goals, but sometimes they do so even in “antagonistic” ways such as exposing
government inaction, criticizing government policies and decisions, and
launching public campaigns against government decisions. Their experiences are
teaching them and also local residents who support them about the role civil
society organizations can play in helping people voice their concerns to policy makers.
Rather than simply shoring up an authoritarian regime, civil society’s engagement
with the state can, at the same time, facilitate the development of NGOs
with the skills to exert inﬂuence through a multitude of channels.
000 • T H E C H INA J OUR N AL, No. 79
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